Speaking of The Future, I had a bit of a surreal experienceday before yesterday. I went to a park downtown with a bookto read (part of my old retired fart routine), and wasinitially puzzled by the fact that half the people thereseemed to be wandering around (usually in pairs, usuallypairs of guys) staring at their smartphones, and it occurredto me that they were all playing this game I'd just seen anarticle about called Pokemon Go, which has apparentlybecome all the rage mere days after its release (it'salso stirred up some controversy over privacy concerns).

I asked one of the guys who wandered by close enough totalk to if he was playing "that new Pokemon Go thing" andsure enough that's exactly what he was doing.

Not only in the park, but as I was walking home there weremore people walking down the street clearly playing thegame.

---------------ACTOR (with American accent): Hullo 1931! That you?A.D. 2500 calling. I've got to tell you a bit about thingsin my day, 500 years after yours. I'll start right in bysaying that everything with us is just about 200% betterthan with you. We're far more intelligent, far more vital.We gotta be, to stand the racket. And we're 163% more spiritual,too, let me tell you. Every one of our churches is nearlytwice as beautiful and many times higher than Saint Paul'sCathedral. In fact everything of ours is much bigger andfaster than everything of yours, including our minds.And -- gosh, there's one of my wives butting in. Now thenBobo, just blow a kiss into the microphone and quit.

ACTRESS (with American accent): Hullo duckies! (Sound of a kiss)Say! Are you the Crinoline Period? Or was it bustles, orharems, or pajamas, or cute little skirts? I was never anygood at history. You ought to see my latest gown. The trainof it's so long I've gotta have two gasoline motors to carry it.And the collar comes right up to the eyes.

ACTOR: That's enough, Bobo. Say, you prehistoric Britishers,what price our English idiom? We had to learn it up speciallyto communicate with you guys. In my time we all speak Americanof course, modern American, I mean. Guess **your** Americanscouldn't understand us when we're talking together. (Pause)Now boys, I gotta introduce you to a lot of our importantpersonages. And the first here's the President of theWorld Republic. (Announcing) His Supreme Superlativity willnow --

THE FUTURE MAN: Stop! Stop this play-acting! . . .Silence! No more of that farce! You're a twentieth centuryEnglishman, engaged by the BBC to broadcast in a play which Isay shall not proceed. . .

All you men and women of the planet Earth who happen to be listeningin tonight, listen well! . . .

Your play-acting is over for tonight. England is going to havesomething else, instead of that cheap fantasy of five hundredyears hence. The listeners shall hear the actual voice of a futureincomparably more remote. I am speaking to you out of an agetwo thousand million years after your day. Realize what thatmeans. The gulf that divides us is two thousand times wider thanthat which divides you from the ape-men of the past. . .

ACTOR: The man's mad. If I could reach the window, I'dcall the police, but I can't move, I can't move.

Funding in A.I. start-ups has increased more than fourfold to$681 million in 2015, from $145 million in 2011, according tothe market research firm CB Insights. The firm estimatesthat new investments will reach $1.2 billion this year,up 76 percent from last year. . .

“This is at the heart of the region’s culture that goes all theway back to the Gold Rush,” said Paul Saffo, a longtimetechnology forecaster and a faculty member at Singularity University. . .

In the most recent shift, the A.I. idea emerged first in Canadain the work of cognitive scientists and computer scientists likeGeoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun during the previousdecade. The three helped pioneer a new approach to deep learning,a machine learning method that is highly effective for patternrecognition challenges like vision and speech. . .

How far the A.I. boom will go is hotly debated. For some technologists,today’s technical advances are laying the groundwork for trulybrilliant machines that will soon have human-level intelligence.

Yet Silicon Valley has faced false starts with A.I. before. Duringthe 1980s, an earlier generation of entrepreneurs also believedthat artificial intelligence was the wave of the future, leadingto a flurry of start-ups. Their products offered little businessvalue at the time, and so the commercial enthusiasm ended indisappointment, leading to a period now referred to as the“A.I. Winter.”

The current resurgence will not fall short this time, said severalinvestors, who believe that the economic potential in terms of newefficiency and new applications is strong.

“There is no chance of a new winter,” said Shivon Zilis, an investorat Bloomberg Beta who specializes in machine intelligence start-ups. . .

For others, like Jerry Kaplan, who helped found two A.I. companiesin the 1980s — Symantec, which became a security company, and Teknowledge,which ultimately shut down — the Valley’s new enthusiasm is troublingbecause it suggests an unfounded optimism similar to earlier erasin which the field overpromised and underdelivered.

“Sometimes when I hang around with A.I. enthusiasts here in the valley,I feel like an atheist at a convention of evangelicals,” he said.====

Funding in A.I. start-ups has increased more than fourfold to$681 million in 2015, from $145 million in 2011, accordingto the market research firm CB Insights. The firm estimatesthat new investments will reach $1.2 billion this year,up 76 percent from last year. . .

“This is at the heart of the region’s culture that goesall the way back to the Gold Rush,” said Paul Saffo, alongtime technology forecaster and a faculty member atSingularity University. . .

In the most recent shift, the A.I. idea emerged first inCanada in the work of cognitive scientists and computerscientists like Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio andYann LeCun during the previous decade. The three helpedpioneer a new approach to deep learning. . .

How far the A.I. boom will go is hotly debated. For sometechnologists, today’s technical advances are laying thegroundwork for truly brilliant machines that will soonhave human-level intelligence.

Yet Silicon Valley has faced false starts with A.I. before.During the 1980s, an earlier generation of entrepreneurs alsobelieved that artificial intelligence was the wave of the future,leading to a flurry of start-ups. Their products offeredlittle business value at the time, and so the commercial enthusiasmended in disappointment, leading to a period now referred to asthe “A.I. Winter.”

The current resurgence will not fall short this time, saidseveral investors, who believe that the economic potential interms of new efficiency and new applications is strong.

“There is no chance of a new winter,” said Shivon Zilis, aninvestor at Bloomberg Beta who specializes in machine intelligencestart-ups. . .

For others, like Jerry Kaplan, who helped found two A.I.companies in the 1980s — Symantec, which became a securitycompany, and Teknowledge, which ultimately shut down — the Valley’snew enthusiasm is troubling because it suggests an unfoundedoptimism similar to earlier eras in which the field overpromisedand underdelivered. . .

“Sometimes when I hang around with A.I. enthusiasts here in thevalley, I feel like an atheist at a convention of evangelicals,”he said.====

When you're hot you're hot. When you're not you're not.Put all the money in and let's roll 'em again.When you're hot you're hot!